Due to the proliferation of wireless networks, there are a continually increasing number of wireless devices in use today. These devices include mobile telephones, personal digital assistance (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities, two-way pagers and the like. Concurrently with the increase of available wireless devices, software applications running on such devices have increased their utility. For example, the wireless device may include an application that retrieves a weather report for a list of desired cities or an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the ability to transmit data of the wireless network in order to provide timely and useful services to users, often in addition to voice communication. However, due to a plethora of different types of devices, restricted resources of some devices, and complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Currently, devices are configured to communicate with Web Services through Internet-based browsers and/or native applications. Browsers have the advantage of being adaptable to operate on a cross-platform basis for a variety of different devices, but have a disadvantage of requesting pages (screen definitions in HTML) from the Web Service, which hinders the persistence of data contained in the screens. A further disadvantage of browsers is that the screens are rendered at runtime, which can be resource intensive. Applications for browsers are efficient tools for designing platform independent applications. Accordingly, different runtime environments, regardless of the platform, execute the same application. However, since difference wireless devices have different capabilities and form factors, the application may not be executed or displayed as desired. Further, browser based application often require significant transfer bandwidth to operate efficiently, which may be costly or even unavailable for some wireless devices.
Current push applications available for mobile devices are proprietary implementations that have not been constructed using a standard specification for the subscription/notification model. Currently there is no known framework to build a mobile application generically, describe it as a ‘notification enabled’ application by pinpointing the notification components and put it in a context from which it can be available to the device for download and point and click execution.
Systems and methods disclosed herein provide a communication system for enabling asynchronous push-based applications on wireless devices to obviate or mitigate at least some of the aforementioned disadvantages.